Tough Times

No relief in sight for portable-toilet companies

Jim Stratton |Sentinel Staff Writer

March 26, 2009

Comfort House Vice President John Sharp Jr. (left) walks past unrented portable toilets with operations manager Keith Hampton. (JOE BURBANK, ORLANDO SENTINEL / March 24, 2009)

The image is surreal, oddly compelling and a spot-on barometer of how badly Florida's construction industry is struggling: more than 2,000 green, molded plastic portable toilets lined up like boxy soldiers on a storage lot in south Orlando.

That they are standing here and not on a job site — providing relief and revenue — is enough to elicit a scrap of dark humor from John Sharp Jr., whose company owns the porta-potties.

"Right now," says Sharp, vice president of Comfort House Inc., "business is stinky."

The scene is a lesson in trickle-down economics. When Florida builders suffer, a smorgasbord of ancillary businesses feel the pain, right down to the folks who service the most basic of needs.

Time was when Orlando-based Comfort House had more than 3,700 units spread across Central Florida. That was in 2005, when construction was the engine behind a booming regional economy. Today, Sharp estimates he has fewer than half that in service.

"We were having builders just walk off [their job sites]," said Sharp, whose family formed the company in the late 1960s and struck gold when it won a Disney contract in the early 1970s. "That gave us an idea of how crazy things were getting."

Other companies in the portable-toilet business face the same problem, according to the Portable Sanitation Association International. The trade group says its members' business is down 50percent to 60percent.

"When the construction industry tanked, you had companies out there that went, 'What happened?'" the association's Millicent Carroll said. "They've been hit really hard."

In cases where work stopped suddenly, many portable-toilet companies were stuck holding the bill. They still had to pay to have units cleaned and hauled back to their storage site.

"Everything we put out there is not reusable," Carroll said.

Built on builders

Portable toilets are a $1.5 billion-a-year business, and the trade group estimates almost 1.5 million units are in service. For most operators, providing portable toilets for construction sites accounts for 70percent of their business. The remaining 30percent comes from special events such as golf tournaments and fairs.

Those events "are great," said Sharp, but construction "is our bread and butter."

Companies have responded to the building slump by trying to capture more of the special-events market, by cutting prices and by laying people off. Eric Anderson, corporate secretary for Mims-based Anderson Rentals Inc., said he has let employees go who've been with the company 15years.

Three years ago, Anderson's payroll stood at 100 people. Today, it's half that. During the boom, the company had about 10,000 units scattered across the 20 counties it serves. Now it has about 3,000.

"It's fun when you're hiring and growing and the economy is healthy," said Anderson, whose company began 42years ago with a handful of wooden portables. "But this — this isn't any fun at all."

Sharp couldn't agree more.

His work force has dropped from 33 to about 23 during the past year, and his company has cut its rates to compete with some of the upstarts in the region.

Price wars, too

Three years ago, companies could get $70 to $80 a month per unit. Now, some operators charge less than $50. The price includes rental of the unit and its cleaning.

The newer, smaller operators, said Sharp, tend to finance the purchase of their toilets and, consequently, are desperate to generate some revenue to keep creditors at bay. Comfort House owns most of its inventory.

"I don't like it," said Sharp, "but if I have to, I can let them sit in the yard and stare at them."

Right now, there's plenty to look at.

A sea of white-capped units cover about one-third of Comfort House's 4-acre site off Sand Lake Road. The company moved here from Winter Park in 2001 to give itself more room. Sharp said that at the height of the building boom — 2004 to 2005 — it grew its operation by 100percent in 11months.

Back then, units were in such demand, the company would call contractors asking when they would be done with a job so it could retrieve a toilet and move it to a new site. No more.

"It's like a ghost town out there," Sharp said. "Just tumbleweeds blowing around."

And though Sharp is acutely aware of the impact on his business, he can rattle off a list of others that are as dependent on him as he is on builders: "The chemical guy, the deodorizer guy, the paper guy."

At times, he said, the economic food chain seems endless.

"Everybody's affected," he said. "It's just an avalanche."